User:Ajhawkins95/NMAC 3108 Journal

Introduction
Hello everyone, my name is Aaliyah and I am an NMAC major at Middle Georgia. I have never really used Wikipedia before, so I feel as if working with a site that I am not familiar with is going to be a little tricky for me but, I am up for the challenge. I look forward to seeing what we all will be able to learn throughout the course.

Entry #2 - Skills and Struggles
So far, I have learned the basic editing skills of the user page and all the things that entails including, how to embed links, how to add pictures, the proper way to site your information and etc. I would also say that I have learned a lot about the "culture" of Wikipedia and how to be a valuable or credited contributor to the site. While I have definitely learned a few things so far, I find that I am still struggling with the creation of things such as headers and subtitles. Also, I struggled with creating the preferred title for my user page by the professor and the proper way to add my journal to the professors talk page.
 * How did you overcome these latter difficulties? Why are headers difficult? There are many resources on Wikipedia to help, including our own Help Forum. —Grlucas (talk) 11:24, 13 June 2019 (UTC)

Entry #3 - Article Evaluation
I have heard the mentioning of the holiday known as Juneteenth throughout the years, but I never had a complete understanding of what this holiday was or was even celebrating for that matter and with this holiday coming up, I chose to look further into it via Wikipedia. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to use the site for research purposes and become familiar with all the positives Wikipedia has to offer, while still developing an understanding of the workings of creating pages and contributing to the site.

The page only has two sections in addition to the overview, but I don't feel like I was missing any information. I liked the fact that the overview section provided a condensed version of the article and if you wanted to read more about it, the History and Official Status sections were there for further reading. I think the article is a good example of how to paraphrase entire articles and using a few key points from each, although I'm not sure on how credible those sources are. I also think that the Official Status section could use a title that does a better job of summarizing that portion of the article.

The are only a few comments on the talk page and some of them reveals possibly false information found within the article. This is a reason why it is important to use credible resources when gathering information.

Entry #4 - Open Topic: Toronto
For the topic of our choosing, I decided to look more into the Canadian city, Toronto. I am interested in learning more about the city as it is one of many destinations in Canada that I would like to visit. I found it interesting to see the difference between the Juneteenth article, which did not have much content on the page, compared to a page about an entire city that has the possibility of containing endless information.

The first thing I see on the page is what I believe to be the overview section, along with the quick info box. These first two sections that are supposed to sum up main facts of the article, but they seem to be overwhelming with the amount of information they contain. I wonder if there is another way to organize the beginning in order to make the article not feel so overwhelming upon first impression. The article has just over 200 references listed so I was interested in looking at the talk page to see the kind of discussion that goes into collaborating on a page of this caliber and was surprised to see that there was not much discussion abut the page. There is only seven sections listed in the contents info box.

The talk page revealed a little more about the way Wikipedia evaluates the article by mentioning things such as Good article criteria and Vital articles. I think articles such as this one would serve as good examples for pages that are looking to be improved upon, looking for formatting examples or even ways to incorporate information found from outside sources.
 * @Ajhawkins95 I think Toronto looks like a beautiful city! There's so much history and beauty within it. I hope to one day go to the Royal Ontario Museum and the Casa Loma. I think you did a great job reviewing the article on Toronto, and hope one day you will get to go! LynzeeWhite (talk) 17:14, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Entry #5 - Sandbox Revision
When looking for an article for an article to contribute towards, I looked at four articles in total. They were all articles that mainly discussed the land and history of the land that Macon was founded on. These articles consisted of information about the Black Belt, the Middle Georgia Regional Airport, and information about the Ocmulgee Mounds and Fort Benjamin Hawkins that are both found in Macon. Between the articles I evaluated, I believe that the article about the Black Belt will be the best article for me to work with for a number of reasons. It has a good amount of resources to allow me to do additional research, there was more activity for me to go off of on the talk page and it had areas that could use room for improvement. Although all the articles had areas that could be improved, we were advised to write about topics that were well researched in order to gather enough information to summarize all of our finding opposed to summarizing just one article. Furthur evaluations of each article can be found in my sandbox.
 * Did you proofread here? Revise? You should have at least 12 journal posts by this point. —Grlucas (talk) 12:49, 8 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I looked at the Ocmulgee Mounds article. I think that it would be nice to use some more photos within the articles. I noticed they put all the photos in a section but I think that it would make the article more visually appealing if some photos were placed throughout the article. Kehli.west (talk) 22:10, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

Entry #6 - Open Topic: Final Article Selection
After reviewing the Macon article and reading more about the Black Belt, I learned that the Black Belt does not run through Georgia, therefore, Macon does not make up a part of the Black Belt. Our assignment requires that we choose a topic that relates to Macon in some way so, I had to review my evaluations and come up with a new topic. I have decided to do further research on the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park or the Indian Removal Act which forced the Creek Indians out of Georgia leaving the mounds behind. The Indian Removal Act article seems as if the background section could be divided up or structured differently. I believe the Indian Removal Act article would be a good article to work on and provide a good opportunity to learn more about an important part of our country's history that is not widely talked about, but with the Act did not involve Macon directly and I think it would be a bit of a stretch to use this article as my final selection. With that said, I have decided on contributing to the Ocmulgee Mounds article as my final selection. I have already done a bit of research and believe I have found enough credible sources to add to the section of the article that is titled "Lamar Phase" and further expand on why it is important or relevant to the Mounds article.

Entry #7 - Citing Sources and Copy Editing
This weeks assignment was a little intimidating for me because we had to copy edit an article and publish the changes for everyone who comes across the article to see. I find this task intimidating because you have to make sure that any spelling, information you include, grammer and everything alike is correct or accurate. While it can be very intimidating to post something to the internet where anyone from around the world can read it but, the good thing about Wikipedia is that someone can always correct your mistakes if any was made and provide advice on what could be improved. I decided to copy edit and add a few changes to the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park article. I was able to use the information I found in my research about the Lamar Period to make information found the "Lamar Phase" section more accurate. I updated the title and reworded a portion of it to make it more accurate and easier to understand. I was also able to find a source and add a citation to the article where a citation needed tag was placed.

Wikipedia was unable to automate my citation for the source I found, so I had to enter the information manually. I did not have any trouble citing the source I found to the article even though I had to do it manually. Wikipedia makes it easy on the user to to do this if the site is unable to cite it automatically by providing the fields needed in order to create the citation and then generating the citation for you using the information you just inputted. I feel as if this is a helpful characteristic of Wikipedia to offer its users because it not only gets rid of the hassle of having to create the citation yourself, but it also encourages users to cite sources as much as possible by making it so easy to do so.

Entry #8 - Open Topic: Finding sources
I am enjoying learning more about the Lamar Period during my research to find additional sources for my chosen article. I have found researching through the Galileo tool that Middle Georgia provides through D2L much easier because it eliminates the step of having to make sure that the source is credible because all of the content that Galileo offers are credible resources. The only problem that I have come across using Galileo, is that I have not been able to find as much information on about my topic that I can use to add to the article and I have had to do further research through Google search because of this.

Using Google can be a little more challenging when finding credible sources because the search results provides such a wide array of websites and content to look through. Although I did not get many results, the majority of the results that came up in Google for me were websites for encyclopedias and articles associated with universities. I also used Google scholar to look and was able to find one other source.

Entry #9 - Open Topic: Working out of my Sandbox
I began working on adding the additional information I found by copying and pasting the Lamar Period section only into my sandbox. The biggest issue I have while creating my rough draft is being sure that I am not violating Wikipedia's copyright policy. In order to do this, I have to work on creating summaries a little more to avoid creating any sentences that are similar to the original work because I am finding it difficult to make summaries of the information I have found and bring everything together in a cohesive way. I tried my best to build on top of what the original author already had by adding citations and adding additional information to back up their facts. I also tried explaining the culture of the Lamar period a little more as well as the characteristics of elements that are distinct to the individuals that inhabited the mound site found in Macon. Another issue I had was making sure my references were transferred to the live article when I moved my work out of my sandbox.

Entry #10 - Open Topic: Peer Review
I chose to review User:Acm2625's revisions on the Tubman Museum article and I posted my review to her sandboxes talk page. I was unclear on where to begin writing a peer review after looking over the "view history" tab on the articles main page. I found the format that Wikipedia uses to track and display changes made to an article very confusing because we are not able to clearly see the end result, after changes were made, compared to how the article appeared before the changes. The Wiki Education page made it much easier to determine what should be focused on while reviewing the article.

Reflective Essay
Working with Wikipedia for the semester has been something very different for me and it took some time getting used to. I was not too familiar with the site as I have always been told not to use Wikipedia because it is not a credible source to find information. Thinking back to high school, teachers told us we could not use it because its collaborative format allows for anyone to go in and write an article or add their own information, and the information may not be accurate. I have never used Wikipedia for research purposes because of that reason. I never really considered Wikipedia to be credible but, this class taught me a lot and I even researched the background on Wikipedia throughout the course of the semester.

It did take some time, but I did eventually get used to using Wikipedia. I very much preferred using quick editing over source editing. I also discovered if you do source editing consistently it will become easier over time, but this format was so different from what I am used to that it was hard for me to catch on. Source editing is similar to coding because you have to use symbols to structure the article and make it look how you want it to. With regular editing you are able to use the tools that are in the toolbar. Quick editing is similar to any other program that you use to when tyoing, and I was most familiar with it when I began using Wikipedia. I used source editing to add comments to my classmate’s journal entries because I found that it was easier to sign my comment using source editing, but for the majority of the class I used quick editing.

Once I got used to the format of the site it was easy to navigate through, but for some reason I am still not very fond of the site itself.

Wikipedia has taught me to use the references provided in the articles reference sections when doing research of my own. Although the information added to an article may not be accurate, the references can lead you to sources related to your research topic that you may not have been able to find on your own. Seeing how some things I found while trying to edit the site was wrong, really opened my eyes to making sure my references were correct when it came time for me to add my own information. This also opened my eyes to looking and making sure the cites listed were correct and still active. Many of the sites I saw on some of the articles reference list were no longer available. I did encounter a few facts stated in articles that would have been better supported if a reference was made to a citation to support the claim they were making. Prior to using Wikipedia during this class, I wouldn’t have paid attention to the citations listed at the bottom or any of the ways an article could be improved.

When I stop and think about Wikipedia only being around since 2001 it makes me think how amazing the internet is as there is a lot of information on Wikipedia over an 18-year period. Since its existence, Wikipedia has become one of the largest reference websites out there which means there is a lot of traffic that comes to the site looking for accurate information. It is written in many different languages which means the information is not only limited to the United State, but it is available globally. The large audience that has access to Wikipedia made it very intimidating for me to add my own findings to the site.

I would always google someone or something and Wikipedia would generally be one of the top search results to look at. I think Wikipedia is a good site to see how old a celebrity might be, possibly what their net worth would be or find out how many awards someone had, and other general information about a topic or subject. Wikipedia would be a go to source for more conversations amongst friends and family opposed to using it as a source in a research project. I now have a new-found respect for Wikipedia after learning how to properly use it and being a part of a community that I never knew existed before, but I most likely would still not like to be a regular user or contributor of the site.